Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure)gave its name to the computer adventure game genre. It was originally designed by Will Crowther, a programmer and caving enthusiast who based the layout on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.
The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll.
Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, generally titled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ..). Large value numeric tags denoted the maximum score a player can achieve after playing a perfect game. Hence, Crowther/Woods Adventure, the first with a point scoring system, is also synonymous with Adventure 350.
Microsoft released a version of Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 as a launch title for the IBM PC, making it the first game available for the new computer. It was released on a single-sided 5¼ inch disk, required 32K RAM, and booted directly from the disk; it could not be opened from DOS. Microsoft's Adventure contained 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved. The progress of two games could be saved on a diskette.
The version that is best known today was the result of a collaboration with Don Woods, a graduate student who discovered the game on a computer at Stanford University and made significant expansions and improvements, with Crowther's blessing. A big fan of Tolkien, he introduced additional fantasy elements, such as elves and a troll.
Many versions of Colossal Cave have been released, generally titled simply Adventure, or adding a tag of some sort to the original name (e.g. Adventure II, Adventure 550, Adventure4+, ..). Large value numeric tags denoted the maximum score a player can achieve after playing a perfect game. Hence, Crowther/Woods Adventure, the first with a point scoring system, is also synonymous with Adventure 350.
Microsoft released a version of Adventure in 1981 with its initial version of MS-DOS 1.0 as a launch title for the IBM PC, making it the first game available for the new computer. It was released on a single-sided 5¼ inch disk, required 32K RAM, and booted directly from the disk; it could not be opened from DOS. Microsoft's Adventure contained 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved. The progress of two games could be saved on a diskette.
Crowther/Woods Adventure (1977) running on a PDP-10andinitiallyRelease1976 (Crowther); 1977 (Crowther/Woods)Mode(s)Colossal Cave Adventure (also known as ADVENT, Colossal Cave, or Adventure) is a text, developed between 1975 and 1977, by for the mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from, and other programmers created variations on the game and ports to other systems in the following years.In the game, the player controls a character through simple text commands to explore a cave rumored to be filled with wealth. Players earn predetermined points for acquiring treasure and escaping the cave alive, with the goal to earn the maximum number of points offered.
Jan 19, 2014 This is a play-through of what's considered the first ever serious text adventure (1977)- and it's not an easy one. Colossal Cave Adventure brings to Windows the game that started it all - the game that pioneered the computer adventure game genre.
The concept bore out from Crowther's background as a enthusiast, with the game's cave structured loosely around the system in.Colossal Cave Adventure is the first known work of and, as the first text adventure game, is considered the precursor for the adventure game genre. Colossal Cave Adventure also contributed towards the and genres. Contents.Gameplay Adventure has the player's character explore a mysterious cave that is rumored to be filled with treasure and gold.
To explore the cave, the player types in one- or two-word commands to move their character through the cave, interact with objects in the cave, pick up items to put into their inventory, and other actions. The program acts as a narrator, describing to the player what each location in the cave has and the results of certain actions, or if it did not understand the player's commands, asking for the player to retype their actions. (The player's commands are shown here in lower case, and the program's replies are in all-capitals.)YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING ANDDOWN A GULLY.go southYOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG AROCKY BED.The program's replies are typically in a humorous, conversational tone, much as a would use in leading players in a tabletop role-playing game. A notable example is when the player dies after falling into a pit.go westYOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY!NOW YOU'VE REALLY DONE IT!
I'M OUT OF ORANGE SMOKE! YOU DON'T EXPECTME TO DO A DECENT REINCARNATION WITHOUT ANY ORANGE SMOKE, DO YOU?yesOKAY, IF YOU'RE SO SMART, DO IT YOURSELF!
I'M LEAVING!Certain actions may cause the death of the character (the player has three lives), requiring the player to start again. The game has a point system, whereby completing certain goals earns a number of predetermined points. The ultimate goal is to earn the maximum number of points (350 points), which partially correlates to finding all the treasures in the game and safely leaving the cave.Development. Will Crowther (left) in 2012 and Don Woods in 2010was a at (BBN), and helped to develop the (a forerunner of the ). Crowther and his wife Pat were experienced, having previously helped to create vector map surveys of the in in the early 1970s for the. In addition, Crowther enjoyed playing the tabletop role-playing game with a regular group which included and, one of the future founders of. Following his divorce from Pat in 1975, Crowther wanted to connect better with his daughters and decided a computerized simulation of his cave explorations with elements of his role-playing games would help.
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He created a means by which the game could be controlled through so that it would be 'a thing that gave you the illusion anyway that you'd typed in English commands and it did what you said'. Crowther later commented that this approach allowed the game to appeal to both non-programmers and programmers alike, as in the latter case, it gave programmers a challenge of how to make 'an obstinate system' perform in a manner they wanted it to. Will Crowther's original Adventure (1976) running on a PDP-10Developed over 1975 and 1976, Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's timesharing computer. The data included text for 78 map locations (66 actual rooms and 12 navigation messages), 193 vocabulary words, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. On the PDP-10, the program loads and executes with all its game data in memory.
It required about 60k (nearly 300kB) of core memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128k words. Crowther's original version did not include any scorekeeping. Once the game was complete, Crowther showed it off to his co-workers at BBN for feedback, and then considered his work on the game complete, leaving the compiled game in a directory before taking a month off for vacation.
During that time, others had found the game and it was distributed widely across the network, which had surprised Crowther on his return. Though titled in-game as Colossal Cave Adventure, its executable file was simply named ADVENT, which led to this becoming an alternate name for the game.One of those that had discovered the game was, a graduate student at in 1976. Woods wanted to expand upon the game and contacted Crowther to gain access to the source code. Woods built upon Crowther's code in FORTRAN, including more -related elements based on his love of the writings of. He also introduced a scoring system within the game and added ten more treasures to collect in addition to the five in Crowther's original version. His work expanded Crowther's game to approximately 3000 lines of code and 1800 lines of data.
The data consisted of 140 map locations, 293 vocabulary words, 53 objects (15 treasure objects), travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. Like Crowther's original game, Woods' game also executed with all its data in memory but required somewhat less core memory (42k words) than Crowther's game. Don Woods continued releasing updated editions through to at least the mid-1990s.Crowther did not distribute the source code to his version, while Woods, once finished with his improvements, widely distributed the code alongside the compiled executable. Woods' 1977 version became the more recognizable and 'canon' version of Colossal Cave Adventure in part due to wider code availability, on which nearly all revisions described in the following section were based. Crowther's original code was thought to have been lost until 2007 when an unmodified version of it was found on Woods' student account archive. Later versions. Later versions of the game added pictures, such as version by.Both Crowther's and Woods' version were designed to run on the PDP-10, enabling certain features unique to the platform.
The PDP-10 architecture was, with each able to store five 7-bit characters.The game's FORTRAN code compared player's commands with its vocabulary but using only the first five letters of each English word.Unfortunately, this limitation was silently evident to the game player too, and adversely affected gameplay ('north' would be equivalent to 'northeast').Hence, Woods added the five-letter limit notes to Crowther's original game instructions.The PDP-10 also implemented which allows saving and restoring of the state of the entire program, instead of a more traditional save file. Both these features made it difficult to directly port the code to other architectures.One of the first efforts to port the code was by of the in 1977.
Gillogly, with agreement from Crowther and Woods, spent several weeks porting the code to to run on the more generic architecture. It can be found as part of the Operating Systems distributions, or as part of the ' package under most distributions, under the command name 'adventure'. The game was also ported to 's super-mini running in the late 1970s, utilizing FORTRAN IV, and to IBM mainframes running VM/CMS in late 1978, utilizing. In 1978, Chris Eisnaugle and Dan Blumenfeld, both high school students at the time, replicated the entire 350-point version of the game by coding a functional equivalent in for a 2000C. The gameplay and text content were identical to the original by Crowther and Woods. In the late 1970s, a version was produced by; some years later this version was ported to the. Also released versions of Adventure in 1979 for the and computers.in 1981 released The Original Adventure.
Endorsed by Crowther and Woods, it was the only version for which they received royalties. Microsoft released in 1981 with its initial version of 1.0 as a for the IBM PC, making it the first game available for the new computer. It was released on a single-sided 5 1⁄ 4 inch disk, required 32K RAM, and; it could not be opened from DOS. Microsoft's Adventure contained 130 rooms, 15 treasures, 40 useful objects and 12 problems to be solved.
The progress of two games could be saved on a diskette. Later versions of the game moved away from general purpose programming languages such as C or Fortran and were instead written for special interactive fiction engines, such as Infocom's.In addition to strict ports of the game, variations began to appear, typically denoted by the maximum number of points one could score in the game; the original version by Crowther and Woods had a maximum of 350 points. Russel Dalenberg's Adventure Family Tree page provides the best (though still incomplete) summary of different versions and their relationships.A generic version of the game was developed in 1981 by Graham Thomson for the as the Adventure-writing kit. This stripped-down version had space for 50 rooms and 15 objects and was designed to allow the aspiring coder to modify the game and thus personalize it. The game's code was published in April 1982.Dave Platt's influential 550-point version (released in 1984) was innovative in a number of ways. It broke away from coding the game directly in a programming language such as FORTRAN or C. Instead, Platt developed A-code – a language for adventure programming – and wrote his extended version in that language.
The A-code source was pre-processed by a FORTRAN 77 (F77) 'munger' program, which translated A-code into a text database and a tokenized pseudo-binary. These were then distributed together with a generic A-code F77 'executive', also written in F77, which effectively 'ran' the tokenized pseudo-binary. Platt's version was also notable for providing a randomized variety of responses when informing the player that, for example, there was no exit in the nominated direction, introducing a number of rare 'cameo' events, and committing some outrageous puns.
Dave Platt's 550-point version of Colossal Cave – perhaps the most famous variant of this game other than the original, itself a jumping-off point for many other versions including Michael Goetz's 581 point version – included a long extension on the other side of the View. Eventually, the player descends into a maze of catacombs and a 'fake Y2'. If the player says 'plugh' here the player is transported to a 'Precarious Chair' suspended in midair above the molten.
(The 581-point version was on SIGM011 from the CP/M Users Group, 1984.)In 2017, received permission from Crowther and Woods to release the source code for a forward port of their last version of the game dating from 1995. Raymond refers to this port as Open Adventure, but it uses the original six-character name for the executable in order to avoid colliding with the BSD port.
Main article:'Xyzzy' is a magic word that teleports the player between two locations ('inside building' and the 'debris room'). Entering the command from other locations produces the disappointing response 'Nothing happens.' As an in-joke tribute to Adventure, many later computer programs (not only games but also applications) include a hidden 'xyzzy' command – the results of which range from the humorous to the straightforward.
Crowther stated that for its purpose in the game, 'magic words should look queer, and yet somehow be pronounceable', leading him to select 'xyzzy'. The meaning and origin of the term are unclear, but Crowther has said 'I made it up out of whole cloth just for the game', and offered that as he had been considering working at at the time, he focused on a word starting with X. Maze of twisty little passages In Crowther's original version of Adventure, he created a maze where each of ten room descriptions was exactly the same; YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.The layout of this 'all alike' maze was fixed, so the player would have to figure out how to map the maze. One method would be to drop objects in the rooms to act as landmarks, enabling one to map the section on paper. Woods' version added a second maze, where the description of each of eleven rooms was similar but subtly different.For example, YOU ARE IN A LITTLE MAZE OF TWISTING PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT.
And YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTING LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL DIFFERENT. The layout was still fixed but the player did not have to drop inventory objects to map the maze. Instead, this 'all different' maze required the player to recognize the wording changes to find maze exits and its solution. Don Woods was doing doctoral research in algorithms, and he designed this maze as (almost) a, with two exceptions important to gameplay.The phrase 'you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike' has become memorialized and popularized in the culture, where 'passages' may be replaced with a different word, as the situation warrants. This phrase came to signify a situation when whatever action is taken does not change the result. The line was used by in the title for his book about the history of, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach To Interactive Fiction. Plugh When the player arrives at a location known as 'Y2', the player may (with 25% probability) receive the message 'A hollow voice says 'PLUGH'.'
This magic word takes the player between the rooms 'inside building' and 'Y2'. Some other games recognize 'PLUGH' and will respond to it, usually by making a joke.
The adventure game contained a cavern with the word 'PLUGH' written on the wall; if the player typed this word into the command parser, he was sent back to his starting point. The TRS-80 adventure game Haunted House – one of the few commercial adventure games playable with only 4K of RAM – requires the player to type PLUGH to enter the haunted house.
If the player types PLUGH inside the haunted house, the game replies, 'Sorry, only one PLUGH per customer.' Another TRS-80 game, replies to PLUGH with 'You got better.' Plugh.com gives further historical background to the name, allegedly by.In popular culture The game 's third act draws direct inspiration from this game, as well as Crowther's career in caving. Crowther, 1976; Crowther & Woods, 1977., pp. 85–87., pp. 56–57.
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Includes download links for many versions and platforms. Jerz, Dennis G.
The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Retrieved 2007-08-11. (as recovered from Don Woods' student account at Stanford)., an actively (as of 2018) maintained version of Adventure for Linux/Unix, Mac OS, Windows and HTML/Javascript., on released by. for the original PDP-10 version drawn by Mari Michaelis.